AN IRAQI PERSPECTIVE
Zeyad is outraged by the recent bombings. And he's not alone; he reports that:

Iraqis are very bitter. Just as everything was looking so promising after the announcement of the Interim Law recently there's this. And I don't think it's going to stop any soon.

But he's a little more careful about drawing the lines of blame:

Statements like 'No Iraqi would commit such an atrocity' or 'No Muslim would do that' are stupid, as if all Iraqis were saints and haven't committed atrocities before. One GC member even went far as to say 'No human being did that'. Of course not, dude, they were Greys from the Zeta Reticuli system.

The reaction of the Shi'ite margi'iyah wasn't a surprise, blaming the coalition. First they ask coalition forces to keep out of the holy sites and stay as far as possible from the festivals, and when something goes wrong they are the first to blame for not providing adequate protection.

There are some important lessons here. First, the lunacy of moral equivalence. We do no one any good by blaming the atrocities of terrorists on those who want to and try to prevent the atrocities of terrorists but occasionally do not succeed. Indignation against the US in such cases is dangerously misdirected. Second, the degree of condescension and cultural racism that characterizes the critique of the war; of course we can't expect Arabs to refrain from committing horrible crimes, they're just barbarians! Zeyad, a smart young Iraqi, has also had his phases of disillusionment with his own people in the past few months. But ultimately, though the US and the UK (and the UN) can help, it is Iraqis who must solve their own problems. And they know it. By protesting in favor of elections, they are asking to be given the chance.

This is the pleasant irony of the occupation: even our failures feed into our success. Religious leaders like Sistani enjoy more trust than the coalition, for understandable cultural reasons, yet Iraqis are drawn to democratic ideas. So Sistani calls for elections, and meets some resistance from the occupation, which has its own ideas about how to manage the political transition. And yet at the same time, the call for elections is exactly the sort of pro-democratic mass mobilization we want to encourage; and thus, by conceding here and there and sometimes standing firm, the coalition wins much bigger than if Iraqis let us passively dictate to them, because we establish patterns of compromise, and of dialog between mass public opinion and the political elite, which are just what democracy needs. In a grimmer way, the same may hold even for these acts of terrorism: public outrage against the terrorists will be channeled into the building of institutions of pulic safety, and into cultural changes that reject murder and atrocities and embrace peaceful dialog, compromise and consensus. This is how democracy establishes itself and becomes durable. You have to take the long view.